Short Fiction quotes

By his exterior Bargamot reminded one rather of the mastodon, or of any of those engaging, but extinct creatures, which for want of room have long ago deserted a world already filling up with flaccid little humans.

Tall, stout, strong, loud-voiced Bargamot loomed big on the police horizon, and certainly would long ago have attained notable rank, if only his soul, compressed within those stout walls, had not been sunk in an heroic sleep.

Outward impressions in passing to Bargamot’s soul by means of his little fat-encased eyes, lost all their sharpness and force, and arrived at their destination only in the form of feeble echoes and reflections.

“You see he has left off.

Children’s grief is not long-lived.

”

And when he dropped his hand, it would fall upon another forehead, hairy and smooth, and his gaze, confused with tears, would meet the caressing black eyes of the dog, and his ears would catch his soft sighs. And touched and comforted he would whisper:

“My friend, my only friend!”

When he recovered, his friends used to come to him, and softly reprove him, giving advice and speaking of the evils of drink. But some of his friends, whom he had insulted when drunk, ceased to notice him in the streets.

“My friend, my friend, my only friend!”

And his trembling hand fell feebly on an empty place.

still others, the happiest and most modest of all, perpetuated their love by entering it in the birth records—by creating posterity.

The love of N+1 was as strong as death, as a certain writer put it; as strong as life, he thought.

Max was firmly convinced that he was the first to have discovered the method of loving so intensely, so unrestrainedly, so passionately, and he regarded with contempt all who had loved before him.

Beginning with Grandmother Eve and ending with the woman upon whom your eyes were directed—before you read these lines—the same inscription is to be clearly and distinctly read on the face of every woman at a certain time.

The difference is only in the quality of the ink.

A very nasty day set in—it was Monday or Tuesday—when Max noticed with a feeling of great terror that the inscription upon the dear face was fading. Max rubbed his eyes, looked first from a distance, then from all sides;

From the day of the funeral silence reigned in the little house.

It was not stillness, for that is the mere absence of noise, but it was silence which means that those who kept silence could, apparently, have spoken if they had pleased.

So thought Father Ignaty when, entering his wife’s chamber, he would meet an obstinate glance, so heavy that it was as though the whole air were turned to lead, and was pressing on his head and back.

Have you ever happened to walk in a burial-ground?

Those little walled-in, quiet corners, overgrown with luscious grass, so small, and yet so ravenous, possess a peculiar dolorous poetry all their own.

But is night needful in order to visit a graveyard? Is not daytime enough—restless, noisy day, sufficient unto which is the evil thereof?

Look into your own soul, and then, be it day or night, you will find there a burial ground.

Small greedy, having devoured so much! And a gentle, sorrowful, whisper will ye hear, an echo of bygone heavy groans when the dead was dear, whom ye left in the tomb, and could not forget nor cease to love.

Live ye in the world—and do not worry me. Do ye not see that I, too, have been in the tomb, and now my head is giddy with the sun, and the air, and gladness.

Ah! how glorious is life for the risen!

Come to me, ye lovely, majestic Sisters. Let me kiss your gentle white hands. What do I see? Is it bread ye are carrying? Did not the darkness of the tomb terrify you—so tender, womanly and weak;

But the windows gazed at me mournfully, and added sadly:

“Thou wilt never kill her. Never! because the weapon thou holdest in thy hand is as much a lie as are her kisses.”

The silent shadows of my fellow-watchers had disappeared long ago, and I was left alone in the cold void, I—and the lonely tongues of fire shivering with cold and despair.

“Oh! I am so frightened!”

I killed her. I killed her, and when she lay a flat, lifeless heap by the window, beyond which shone the dead-white plain, I put my foot on her corpse, and burst into a fit of laughter.

It was not the laugh of a madman; oh, no! I laughed because my bosom heaved lightly and evenly, and within it all was cheerful, peaceful, and void, and because from my heart had fallen the worm which had been gnawing it.

The fact is, as you perceive, that I had made a grievous mistake. I had killed the woman, but made the lie immortal.

Kill not a woman till you have, by prayer, by fire, and torture, torn from her soul the truth!

So thought I, and continued my endless tramp from corner to corner of the cell.

But the lie remains, it is immortal. I feel it in every atom of the air, and when I breathe, it enters my bosom with a hissing, and then rends it—yes, rends!

Oh! what madness it is⁠—to be man and to seek the truth! What pain!

Then we all prayed: “Kill us!”

But, though we were dying every second, we were immortal, like the gods.

And there passed by a gust of anger mingled with delight, and the Night, weeping tears of rue, sadly sighed, and like a consumptive spat out upon us damp sand.

“We will deal in stones, which fall from the wall.”

How stupid to beget children only to kill them!

But then she will soon deceive him; she has such shifty eyes.

It was, if one may use the expression, a face in the abstract. It had nose, eyes, and mouth all right enough, and all in the proper places; but there was nothing human about it.

A human being could not look so placid⁠—even in his coffin.

It was expressive neither of sorrow, nor cheerfulness, nor surprise—it expressed absolutely nothing! It looked at you squarely, and placidly—and an uncontrollable laughter overwhelmed you. My companions rolled about on the sofas, sank impotently down on the chairs, and gesticulated.

And I perceived, I perceived at last, how a tender, piteous smile parted her lips, and her eyelashes were lifted all a-tremble. Slowly, timorously, but with infinite confidence, she turned her head towards me, and—

And such a shriek of laughter I never heard!

“No, no, I can’t,” she almost groaned, and throwing back her head, she burst into a resonant cascade of laughter.

“No, no, I can’t,” she almost groaned, and throwing back her head, she burst into a resonant cascade of laughter.

Oh, if but for a moment I could have had a human face!

I bit my lips, tears rolled over my heated face; but it—that idiotic mask, on which everything was in its right place, nose, eyes, and lips—looked with a complacency staidly horrible in its absurdity.

His was a sickly, anaemic body, worn out with work, eaten up by sufferings and vodka.

Death was already on the watch for him, like a grey bird-of-prey blind in the sunshine, sharp-eyed in the black night.

By day death hid itself in the dark corners, but at night it took its seat noiselessly by his bedside, and sat long, till the very dawn, and was quiet, patient, and persistent.

And Senista’s face, with its appealing look and parched lips seemed to be constantly before him, as clear and as lifelike as though the boy himself were there.

“Ain’t we human, kid? Oh, Lord!”

Sazonka kept on saying to himself, as he hurried along. Now he is in front of the large yellow hospital-building, with its black-framed windows, which look like gloomy eyes.

And there he remained, overwhelmed with dumb grief. The new grass tickled his face gently; a sweet, quieting odor came from the ground, and the earth seemed to exhale a feeling of mighty power, of a passionate appeal for life.

The eternal mother earth was enfolding a sinning son in her embrace, and was filling his suffering heart with warmth, love, and hope.

And far away, in the city, the joyful holiday bells were ringing their discordant melody.

It was essential to her that this man should live, and in one way or another she would have served him. Such slavish natures exist. Slave-like, they cannot understand or value the strength of others than their master.

The world has seen clever women, good women and talented women, but it has yet to see a just woman.

I candidly admit that this is not for the purpose of securing your unnecessary condescension, but rather to demonstrate the straightforward and normal manner in which was born my resolution, and that it was a no slight struggle with my compassion towards the man whom …

I refer to the towel incident. Being stronger than Masha I could have killed her, as there was no one present but us two, and if she had cried out or caught my hand … but she did nothing of the kind. She merely said:

“No need of that, golubchik.”

I have thought often about this phrase and till now cannot grasp the astonishing power concentrated in it and felt by me. It is not in the words, which in themselves are meaningless and empty;

My father became angry, as he accepted my answer as an untimely and flat jest. He saw my face, he heard my voice and nevertheless accepted it as a jest.

Wretched pasteboard clown, through misapprehension thou art called a man!

He did not know my soul, although the outward order of my life perturbed him, as he did not enter into its understanding. I was an apt pupil at the gymnasia, and this distressed him.

Now, however, I saw that I was not a lord, but a slave, wretched and helpless.

Imagine to yourself that you are living in a house containing many rooms, that you occupy one room and think that you dominate the entire house. And suddenly you discover that the other rooms are occupied.

Yes, occupied. Occupied by some mysterious beings, perhaps people, perhaps something else, and the house belongs to them. You wish to learn who they are, but the door is locked, and no sound issues therefrom, no voice.

It is an ill-boding solitude; in myself I constitute but an infinitesimal part; within myself I am surrounded and suffocated by enemies, morosely silent and mysterious. Whither I go they go with me;

I am solitary midst a vast emptiness, and cannot confide in myself.

It is the solitude of madness, and I have no means of knowing who I am, because my lips, my mind, my voice, are all given to utter the thoughts of the unknown they.

One cannot live thus. Meanwhile the world slumbers and husbands kiss their wives and learned men read their lectures, and the beggar rejoices in the penny thrown his way.

Oh, stupid world, happy in thy stupidity, terrible will be thy awakening!

Who amongst the strong shall come to my aid? None! None! Where shall I seek that eternal something to which I may cling with my piteous, powerless, awesomely solitary “I?” Nowhere! Nowhere!

And if I should request you to say in court that I am in a normal state least of all shall I believe you. You may decide for yourselves, but no one can decide for me the question:

Did I simulate madness in order to slay, or did I slay because I was mad?

But the judges will believe you and sentence me to that which I wish: hard labor. Please do not place a false construction upon my intentions. I do not repent of slaying Saveloff; I do not seek in punishment an expiation of sin;

Lie, if you do not believe it. However, if you pusillanimously wash your learned hands and sentence me to the insane asylum, or open the doors to freedom, I forewarn you in a friendly way that I’ll commit some considerable unpleasantries.

I acknowledge no judge, no law, no forbidden thing. All is permissible.

Can you imagine a world, having no laws of gravitation, having no above nor below, in which everything is a matter of whim and chance?

She also was pleased at having such an original for her son, and that his Excellency himself had given away the bride. But with regard to the colour, and other disabilities of the bride, she expressed herself thus:

“Let her face be that of a sheep, if only her soul be human.”

At the end of two years Semyon Vasilyevich died of typhus fever. Before the end he sent for the parish priest, who looked with curiosity on the quondam Miss Korraito, stroked his full beard, and said meaningly, “N … y … es!”

With his last efforts he gave to his emaciated face the semblance of a happy smile, and expired with it on his lips.

And the earth received him without emotion, not asking whether he loved negresses or no, brought his body to corruption, mingled his bones with those of other dead people, and annihilated every trace of the white paper-collar.

But the Second Department long cherished the memory of Semyon Vasilyevich, and when the waiting petitioners began to grow weary, the porter would take them to his room to smoke, and would tell them tales of the wonderful civil-servant who was so awfully fond of …

And the earth received him without emotion, not asking whether he loved negresses or no, brought his body to corruption, mingled his bones with those of other dead people, and annihilated every trace of the white paper-collar.

But the Second Department long cherished the memory of Semyon Vasilyevich, and when the waiting petitioners began to grow weary, the porter would take them to his room to smoke, and would tell them tales of the wonderful civil-servant who was so awfully fond of negresses.

And all, narrator and listeners, were pleased.

Thus they walked, and Ben-Tovit made a martyr’s face, shook his head and groaned skilfully, while Samuel nodded compassionately and uttered exclamations from time to time, and from the deep, narrow defiles, out of the distant, burning plains, rose the black night.

It seemed as though it wished to hide from the view of heaven the great crime of the earth.

… sit down stout and listless, as though he had been boiled soft, and felt how soft and flabby were his useless arms under the cloth of his uniform, and how his powerful body, created for work, grew weary with the torturing fatigue of doing nothing.

We are bored only in the head, but he was bored in every part of him, from head to foot: his cap, cocked on one side with youthful lack of purpose, was bored, his spurs were bored and tinkled inharmoniously and irregularly as though muffled.

Then he began to yawn. How he yawned!

For the space of three years after the child’s birth the priest and his wife lived ’twixt fears, doubts and hopes, but when three years had passed it became evident that little Vassya had been born an idiot.

Conceived in madness, he had come into the world a madman.

Another year passed in the benumbed stupefaction of grief, but when they emerged from this comatose state and began to look about, they discovered that above their thoughts and their lives sat enthroned the monstrous image of the idiot.

… laughed and pilfered trumps out of the deck, and it seemed to her that the whole world was laughing and jesting, but the moment the last sound of her words died in the air, the same threatening and unbroken stillness closed over her, stifling her.

And it was terrible to look upon the two pairs of mute and scrawny arms that moved slowly and silently over the table, as though these arms alone were alive and the people who owned them did not exist.

Then shivering, as though with a crazedly drunken expectation of something supernatural, she looked up above the table—two cold—pallid—sullen faces loomed desolately in the darkness and swayed back and forth in a queer and wordless whirl—two cold, two sullen faces.

… cool and oddly calm gesture, he raised up his hands and clasped his head even as his wife had done a half hour before, and as calmly and deliberately he brought them down again, and between his fingers trembled threads of black and greying hair.

Among people, mid their affairs and conversations, Father Vassily was so evidently a man apart, so unfathomably alien to all, that he did not seem human at all, but a moving cerement.

He did whatever others did, he talked, he worked, he ate and drank, but it seemed at times as though he merely imitated others, while he personally lived in a different world that was inaccessible to any. And all who saw him asked themselves:

Gone was the solitude; and with it the sun and the bright desert distances, and the gloom of the night had grown in intensity.

All the people gave him truth.

When he did not hear their truthful utterances, he saw their homes and their faces: and upon homes and faces was engraved the inexorable truth of life.

His face was dark with the dusk of night, but his eyes were shining brightly, and in his suppressed voice seemed to lurk the vast expanse of the fields and the fragrance of grass and the joy of persistent toil.

“It is beautiful out in the fields,” he said with laughter that sounded subdued, enigmatic and somber, as though he derided someone, perhaps himself.

“Of course, Vassya, of course. Of course, it’s beautiful,” retorted the Popadya with conviction and they went in to supper. After the vastness of the fields Father Vassily felt crowded in the tiny living room;

“

It is better so. How can he rise in this state before his wife and children?

” swiftly flits through Father Vassily’s mind, and for the third and last time he commands, softly and sternly:

to us it appeared as one endless day without any beginning, sometimes dark, sometimes bright, but always incomprehensible and blind.

And nobody was afraid of death, for nobody understood what death was.

On the third or fourth night—I do not remember which—I lay down for a minute behind the breastwork, and, as soon as I shut my eyes, the same familiar and extraordinary picture stood before them:

“Are you afraid?” I asked, touching his elbow. But his elbow seemed as if made of wood, and he only smiled and remained silent.

Better to say, his lips alone were twitching into a smile, while his eyes were full of youth and terror only⁠—nothing more.

“Are you afraid?” I repeated kindly. His lips twitched, trying to frame a word, and the same instant there happened something incomprehensible, monstrous and supernatural.

I recognised it—that red laugh. I had been searching for it, and I had found it—that red laugh. Now I understood what there was in all those mutilated, torn, strange bodies.

It was a red laugh. It was in the sky, it was in the sun, and soon it was going to overspread the whole earth⁠—that red laugh!

While they, with precision and calmness, like lunatics. …

“You don’t understand what duty is!”

“Home? Listen! he wants to go home!”

There was a burst of laughter and of painful shouts—and again all became silent—giving way before the incomprehensible. And then not only I, but every one of us felt that. It was coming towards us out of those dark, mysterious and strange fields;

His tread was firm as if he were marching, and he was staring through me at something farther on and higher up.

“And they are sleeping,” said he, as it seemed, quite calmly.

I flew into a rage, as if the reproach was addressed to me.

And bending over me he whispered through his yellow smoked moustache—

“A time will come when nobody will be able to go away from here. Yes, neither I nor anybody,”

and in his old eyes, so close to me, I saw the same fixed, dull, stricken expression. And something terrible, unbearable, resembling the fall of thousands of buildings, darted through my head, and growing cold from terror, I whispered—

“Well, and what of that?” asked I, also in a whisper, full of terror.

“Nothing. Like sane people.”

“The red laugh,” said I.

…

Happily he died last week on Friday.

I say “happily,” and repeat that my brother’s death was a great blessing to him. A cripple with no legs, palsied, with a smitten soul, he was terrible and piteous in his senseless creative ecstasy.

of a headless skeleton on horseback, of a shapeless shadow, born in a black thundercloud, mutely enveloping the earth, but not one of them can give me an answer and extinguish the cold, constant, blunt horror that possesses me.

I do not understand war, and I must go mad, like my brother, like the hundreds of men that are sent back from there. And this does not terrify me.

The loss of reason seems to me honourable, like the death of a sentry at his post. But the expectancy, the slow and infallible approach of madness, the instantaneous feeling of something enormous falling into an abyss, the unbearable pain of tortured thought.

I do not understand war, and I must go mad, like my brother, like the hundreds of men that are sent back from there. And this does not terrify me.

The loss of reason seems to me honourable, like the death of a sentry at his post.

But the expectancy, the slow and infallible approach of madness, the instantaneous feeling of something enormous falling into an abyss, the unbearable pain of tortured thought.

“

We, the dead, lie down on the living.

Do you feel warm?”

“

Work on, brother, work on! Your pen is not dry, it is steeped in living human blood.

Let your paper seem empty—in its ominous emptiness it is more eloquent of war and reason than all that is written by the most clever men. Work on, brother, work on!”

he recalled the button below, which was torn out together with a piece of cloth, pictured to himself his own yellow, sour face, which he hid; his blue spectacles; and with venomous joy he discovered that he really resembled a spy. Particularly that button.

Spies have nobody that would sew on their buttons for them.

Now he looked at everything with the same eyes that the girl did, and all was new to him.

He was a nonentity: the spirit of a rabbit and the shameless patience of a beast of burden.

When fate, with malicious mockery, had cast him into our somber ranks, we laughed with insane merriment. What ridiculous, absurd mistakes will happen! But he—he, of course, wept.

… every passerby was a separate microcosm, with his own rules and aims of life, with his own affinity, whom he loved, with his own separate joys and sorrows, and each was like a ghost, which appeared for a moment and then disappeared inexplicably and unrecognized.

And the more people there were, who were unknown to one another, the more terrible became the solitude of each.

And during those black, rumbling nights Petrov often felt inclined to cry out in fear, and to betake himself to the deep cellar, in order to be there perfectly alone.

He has evidently a severe cold, for he draws from his pocket a handkerchief and uses it with apparent enjoyment, emitting a loud and trumpet-like sound. Then he pulls himself together, pockets his handkerchief and grows majestically rigid. He is ready. Such is the Twentieth.

They had been expecting a King, but there appeared before them a clown.

They had been expecting a dragon, but there came a big-nosed bourgeois with a handkerchief and a bad cold. It was funny, and curious and a little uncanny. Had not someone substituted a pretender in his place? “It is I, the King,” says the Twentieth.

“Horrible thought!

Is insignificance the secret of tyranny? Are nonentities our real tyrants?

”

Finally he received from St. Petersburg a flattering acknowledgment of his detailed report of the occurrence. One would have thought that this would lighten the load and sink his burden in the sea of the past!

But the fact will not sink! As though deriving its power from Time and Death, it stands rigid in his remembrance⁠—the unburied corpse of a vanished event.

Stubbornly, night after night, he seeks to bury it; the darkness passes, day breaks, and there again—the beginning and end of all things, between him and the world stands that indelible picture: the signal with the white handkerchief, the crack of rifles, the blood!

“You see now, my dear boy!” came in Peter Iljitch’s deep voice, with a startling ring of mockery. “You wouldn’t believe me when I told you!

There he sits in your own head!

”

As far as concerned himself, he still lived; but to the others he had already died, and they handled the dead carelessly, and felt the cold and the gloom that emanated from him without quite understanding what it meant.

Thought can kill in time! Drawing its strength from the Eternal Sources, it is mightier than engines, weapons, or powder!

It robs men of their will, and makes even the instinct of self-preservation blind. It clears a free space for its deadly stroke; as the forest underbrush is cleared about the tree that must be felled! So this thought was killing the Governor!

Of all his former habits, card-playing was the only one which he still enjoyed. Twice a week he had his whist, and he played for small stakes with keen and evident pleasure.

He was a thoughtful, clever player, and if his partner revoked he called him down in proper shape.

“What are you thinking of, my dear sir! I led diamonds!” flashed out his cool, clear voice—hard and cutting as the diamond itself … and Maria Petrovna, in the next room, hearing her husband’s voice, would smile her tired smile and shake her head sadly.

They had summoned musicians to play merry tunes: the cymbal, the pipe, the lute and the timbrel. And it sounded like the humming of bees, like the chirping of crickets, like the singing of birds, this rejoicing in the house of Mary and Martha.

A reckless one lifted the veil.

A reckless one, with one breath of a fleeting word, destroyed the sweet dreams and revealed the truth in its hideous nakedness. The thought was not yet clear in the questioner’s head when his lips, parting in a smile inquired:

A reckless one, with one breath of a fleeting word, destroyed the sweet dreams and revealed the truth in its hideous nakedness. The thought was not yet clear in the questioner’s head when his lips, parting in a smile inquired:

“Why don’t you tell us, Lazarus, what was There?”

And they all paused, amazed at the query, as though they had just realized that Lazarus had been dead three days, and they glanced up curiously awaiting the answer. But Lazarus was silent.

As though, turned to stone they stood in different corners, and darkness enveloped them; and in that darkness more and more vividly burned the dreadful vision of him who for three days and for three nights had been under the mysterious spell of Death.

Three days he had been dead; three times the sun rose and set, and he was dead; the children played, the brooks coursed babbling over the stones, the biting dust swept over the highway⁠—but he was dead.

And now he was again among the living—touching them, looking at them—looking at them! and from the black orbs of his pupils, as through a dark glass, there gazed upon the people the inscrutable Beyond.

and the horseshoes clattered and clatterer upon the pavements. Caught all around by the whirlpool of noisy merriment there moved through the city like a blot of icy silence one fat and clumsy creature sowing in his path annoyance, wrath and a vaguely cankering grief.

Who dare be sad in Rome?

The citizens were indignant and frowned, and two days later the whole ready tongued Rome knew of the miraculously resurrected one and timidly avoided him.

And in the evening, when the sun, ruddy and swollen, was sinking in the west, sightless Lazarus slowly groped after it. He stumbled over stones and fell, fat and weak as he was, then he rose heavily and walked on.

And against the crimson canvas of the sunset his dark form and outstretched arms gave him a monstrous resemblance to the cross.

And it happened one day that he went and never returned. Thus apparently ended the second life of Lazarus, who had been three days under the dominion of Death and miraculously rose from the dead.

But glancing at Judas, who with bated breath and tightly clenched teeth still clung to the stubborn stone, Peter burst out in a laugh:

“Look at the sick man! Look at our poor ailing Judas.”

And Judas himself laughed, being so unexpectedly exposed in a lie, and the others laughed also; even Thomas suffered a smile to slip past his straight, shaggy mustache.

and in that multitude there were only these two, inseparable unto death, strangely bound together by fellow-suffering—He who was betrayed unto mockery and torture and he who had betrayed Him.

From one chalice of suffering they drank like brothers, the Betrayed and the Traitor, and the fiery liquid seared alike the pure and the impure lips.

Gazing fixedly at the fire which beguiled the eye into a sensation of heat, holding over it his lanky and shivering hands, all tangled into a maze of arms and legs, trembling shadows and fitful light, the Iscariot groaned pitifully and hoarsely:

“How cold! My God, how cold!”

Thus in the night time, when the fisher folk have set out in their boats leaving ashore a smouldering campfire some strange denizen of the deep may come forth from the bowels of the sea and creeping to the fire gaze on it fixedly and wildly, stretching its limbs towards the flames and groan pitifully and hoarsely:

“How cold! Oh, my God, how cold!”

“That’s so. That’s so. Hearest Thou this, Jesus?”

But he was not free⁠—he was like a fly tied to a thread: buzzing it flies hither and thither but not for an instant the pliant and obstinate thread releases it.

Thoughts that seemed hewed out of stone weighed down his head and he could not shake them off. He knew not what thoughts these were, he feared to stir them up, but he felt their presence constantly.

The soldiers drive him away with stinging blows of their whips, and writhing to escape the leash, gnashing his teeth at the soldiers, he hurriedly explains:

“I am with Thee. Thither. Understandest Thou? Thither!”

Wiping the blood from his face he shakes his fist at the soldier who turns around and points him out to his comrades.

“

He was not a deceiver. He was innocent and pure. Hear ye? Judas cheated you. Judas betrayed unto you an Innocent One.

”

“Thou askest this, Thomas? Well, well,” replied Judas craning his head and suddenly he broke out with vehemence: “

He who loves asks not what to do. He goes and does all.

He weeps, he snaps, he strangles his foe, he breaks his limbs. He who loves! When thy son is drowning, goest thou into the marketplace and askest the passerby: ‘What am I to do? My son is drowning.’

And in the presentiment of cheerful, harmonious work, I firmly embraced my wife, while she looked above the houses, above the roofs, looked at the young crescent of the moon, which was already setting.

The moon was so young, so strange, even as a young girl who is dreaming and is afraid to tell her dreams; and it was shining only for itself.

“When will we have a full moon? …”

“

What right have you to be fine when I am so common?

”

“Don’t shriek, my dear.

Shrieks avail nothing against the truth⁠—I know that for myself.

” And then in a whisper, looking straight in his eyes, she added: “For God, too, is fine!”

and that it would always be so. And he did not know which side to turn, up or down, but only that he was opposed, tormentingly opposed, to all that had that day become part of his very life and soul.

Shameful to be fine.

…

“

I do not wish to be fine.

”

If with our light we cannot illumine all the darkness, then let us put out the signal fires, let us all crawl in the dark!

If there be not paradise for all, then I will have none for myself!

And this, girls, this is no part of paradise, but simply and plainly a piggery! A toast, girls! That all the signal fires be extinguished. Drink! To the Dark!”

And those fools told me: ‘At one o’clock in the afternoon, your Excellency!’ and they thought I would be glad. But instead of that Death stationed itself in the corner and would not go away. It would not go away because it was my thought.

It is not death that is terrible, but the knowledge of it: it would be utterly impossible to live if a man could know exactly and definitely the day and hour of his death.

And the fools cautioned me: ‘At one o’clock in the afternoon, your Excellency!’ ”

… kindness or joyous recollections—she looked at it simply because in all the filthy, official hall the blue bit of sky was the most beautiful, the purest, the most truthful object, and the only one that did not try to search hidden depths in her eyes.

The judges pitied Sergey Golovin; her they despised.

Her neighbor, known only by the name of Werner, sat also motionless, in a somewhat affected pose, his hands folded between his knees.

At last she went away. She wept bitterly, wiping her face with the edges of her kerchief, and she did not see the road.

And the farther she got from the prison the more bitterly she wept.

She retraced her steps to the prison, and then she strangely lost her way in the city in which she had been born, in which she lived to her old age.

… their belts, which several hours later were to tear them into pieces, Tanya Kovalchuk’s hands had trembled with nervousness, and it had become necessary to put her aside, while Vasily jested, made merry, turned about, and was even so reckless that Werner had said sternly:

“You must not be too familiar with Death.”

What was he afraid of now? But this incomprehensible fear was so foreign to Musya’s soul that she ceased searching for the cause of it—and suddenly she was seized with a desperate desire to see Seryozha Golovin, to laugh with him.

He had one fault—he was convinced that he could sing well, whereas in fact he had no ear for music and even sang the revolutionary songs out of tune, and felt offended when his friends laughed at him.

“Either you are all asses, or I am an ass,” he would declare seriously and even angrily.

And all his friends as seriously declared: “You are an ass. We can tell by your voice.”

“

Musya, how young you are!

”

And the spring snow was just as soft and fresh; the spring air was just as strong and fragrant. And on the snow lay Sergey’s black rubber-shoe, wet, trampled under foot.

Thus did men greet the rising sun.

I repeat, there was no error, nor could there be any error in a case in which a combination of definite circumstances inevitably lead a normally constructed and developed mind to the one and only conclusion.

I was convicted justly, although I did not commit the crime⁠—such is the simple and clear truth, and I live joyously and peacefully my last few years on earth with a sense of respect for this truth.

The only purpose by which I was guided in writing these modest notes is to show to my indulgent reader that under the most painful conditions, where it would seem that there remains no room for hope or life—a human being, a being of the …

in the wild city where all doors are open, and all windows are open—passersby look wearily through the glass walls and observe the same evidences of the hearth and the alcove.

Only the creatures that can be alone possess a face; while those that know no solitude⁠—the great, blissful, sacred solitude of the soul⁠—have snouts instead of faces.

And in calling my friends “perfidious traitors” I, poor youth that I was, could not understand the wise law of life, according to which neither friendship, nor love, nor even the tenderest attachment of sister and mother, is eternal.

With a sigh I go back in silence, and he moves behind me noiselessly, about two steps away, watching every move of mine.

Our prison is beautiful at sunset.

Hush, hush, hush! Move nearer to me. Look into my eyes.

I have always been a charming creature, so gentle, so sensitive, so grateful, and wise, and noble, and so elastic in the curvings of my beautiful body! It will be a joy for you to see my quiet dance:

It will be a joy for you to see my quiet dance: now I will curl my body in rings; my scales will glitter dully, as I embrace myself so gently and in this tender-cold embrace multiply my body of steel.

Alone in the multitude! Alone in the multitude!

Hush, hush! Look into my eyes.

I say to you, Move closer!

Why did they not love me?

For even then I was a charming creature, so kind, so gentle. And how I danced! But they tormented me, with fire they burned me. The coarse and heavy beasts trampled me down with the large hoofs of their madly-beating feet;

And having shattered it, it will leave upon his soft waxy blood-grey brain the impress of my song of freedom, like the seal of a king, like a new commandment of wrath—and thus will the jailer go down to his grave.

I say, jailer, shut not your ear, for I shall enter through your skull!

If I am then alive, I shall laugh with joy; and if I chance to be dead, my bones shall dance in their insecure grave. That will be a merry Tarantella!

But don’t go and make a sign of the cross upon your brow, or worse than that—don’t go and order a requiem mass—they did not like such things.

Honor the dead with the silence of truth, and if you must lie, lie in some merrier fashion, but never by saying mass: they did not like that.

That first quake that destroyed the prison and the city had a voice of rare power and of queer, superhuman dignity: it roared from below, from beneath the ground, it was vast and hoarse and menacing; and everything shook and crumbled.

And it was no use to think whether he was just or not, so strong and eternal he was. Even in my dreams I saw no freedom—I did not believe, expect or feel it. And I feared to call it.

It is perilous to call freedom; while you keep still, you may live; but call freedom once, ever so softly, you must either gain it or die.

This is true, so said Pascale, the professor.

under my feet was the road, and the road is always free; it was made to walk on, it was made for the feet to move over its surface, going back and forth, leaving one spot and finding another.

The road is the sweetheart of him who is free; you have to kiss it on meeting, to weep over it on parting.

And when my feet began to move upon the road, I thought that a miracle had occurred. I looked, and Pascale’s feet were also moving, the professor! I looked, and the youngster was also moving with youthful feet, hurrying, stumbling, and suddenly he ran.

A long time we walked about the city and saw much that was striking, strange and sinister.

Neither can you shut in the fire

—I was saying this, I, Geronimo Pascagna. If you would be at peace, put it out altogether, but do not lock it up in stone, in iron or in glass; it will escape, and your strongly built house will come to a bad end.

Grim death is still in thy blanched nostrils, and already thou art sniffing at something, turning thy nose this way and that way.

How fast buildest thou thy prisons, O Man!

The iron does not even rattle—so strong it is. And it is cold to the touch like someone’s icy heart. Silent is also the stone of the walls—so proud it is, so everlasting and mighty.

But I do not believe in thy prison, O Man, my master! I do not believe in thy iron; I do not believe in thy stone, in thy power, O Man, my master!

That which I have once seen destroyed, shall never be knit together again.

Thus would have spoken even Pascale, the professor.

“How shall I say it you, Noni?” answers the sailor cautiously but stubbornly. “There are no truthful people there. It has been so ever since the deluge.

At that time all the honest people went out to sea, and only the cowards and liars remained upon the solid earth.

”

“

Grass also stops growing if a stone falls upon it.

”

“What’s the use of pride?

Pride isn’t necessary.

”

And even the multitude of revolving wheels and horses’ heads did not impress themselves so clearly upon his memory as this new and unusually interesting appearance of the ground.

Everything was enormous to him⁠—the fences, the dogs and the people⁠—but that did not at all surprise or frighten him; that only made everything particularly interesting; that transformed life into an uninterrupted miracle.

According to his measures, various objects seemed to him as follows:

After which Yura found himself standing on his legs, red faced, dishevelled, feeling very miserable and terribly happy at the same time.

The day was rushing fast, like a cat that is chased by a dog.

Like forerunners of the coming great festival, certain messengers appeared with notes, wonderfully tasty cakes were brought, the dressmaker came and locked herself in with mamma in the bedroom;

Mamma danced best of all.

Night arrived in the form of red, green and yellow lanterns.

While there were no lanterns, there was no night. And now it lay everywhere. It crawled into the bushes; it covered the entire garden with darkness, as with water, and it covered the sky.

All the shops along the road were selling bread in abundance, and I had thrust some stupid crusts into my pocket in case of need.

Prudence and foresight⁠—under any circumstances!

The weather was glorious at the time, but we had no faith even in the weather.

There was I running away to save my family from some impending disaster, and leaving the poor girl behind, because there wasn’t room enough for her in the cart, or because I had to leave someone behind to look after my property!

Under no circumstances did I forget my property!

It is consoling to think that, though Annisia cried and begged to be taken, she bore us no grudge for having left her. Foolish woman!

Even I can’t resist doing so. It is more than the scrutiny of my purse that I mind, it is the scrutiny of my soul that I object to.

My soul is my own; I am its master.

The State can dispose of my body, if it wills, in so far as the law permits, but no one, not Peter the Great himself, has the right of probing into my soul and introducing his laws there, no matter how excellent they may be.

There she is, sleeping with a feeling of injury, while I cannot sleep, and suffer in my forced loneliness. Ah, Sasha, Sasha! Do you think my lot is an easy one?

I envy every dog barking innocently in its backyard, for it knows nothing of Germans slaughtering Russians and Russians Germans!

Oh, for some dark garret in which to hide, as when a boy I used to hide from my stepfather! “How shall I fly from thy spirit?”

I even pointed Turkey out to her on the map. The little thing didn’t understand, of course; she was more interested in the idea that there was so much water. She made me leave my paper to come and watch her skipping.

Skip away, my child, skip away, and rejoice that you are not a Belgian or Polish child, for you would have perished in the flames or been killed by a bomb dropped from the clouds.

How horrible to think that even children are being slaughtered!

This is not fiction, but naked fact.

Do you know what blood on snow looks like, Sashenka? Like a red watermelon. Isn’t it funny?

”

From now onwards I am no longer Ilya Petrovitch Dementev, but a “cell,” with no right even to think for myself for fear of upsetting the whole show!

No, sir, I am not a “cell” but Ilya Petrovitch Dementev, as I always was⁠—a man with all a man’s rights!

You may ask me as much as you like to die exulting, but I refuse to die dancing! If it should so happen that you drive me to my grave or to the lunatic asylum, I will die in hatred, cursing those who murdered me.

I am not a “cell,” and I refuse to become an angel after your pattern! I would much rather be Ilya Petrovitch, the sinner that I am, answerable to God alone for my sins!

I refuse to perish for the good of posterity! I haven’t the smallest desire to do so!

Where is the sense in it all, if the man of yesterday suffered for me, and I must suffer for the man of tomorrow, and the man of tomorrow must suffer for the man of the day after tomorrow?

Anyone who can speak of a human being in other than the dignified term of man, and can look upon him as no more than a figure in a number, is a servant of Satan. He deceives himself and others.

When a man begins to count other men, he loses all values and every sense of pity.

Here is an example of my meaning in a few words taken out of my paper, reporting some engagement. “Our losses were insignificant; only two killed and five wounded.”

This comes of speaking of men in numbers like so much grain! The very look of a figure takes all the sense out of one. Millions, indeed!

Man is not so much seed to be measured!

Anyone who can speak of a human being in other than the dignified term of man, and can look upon him as no more than a figure in a number, is a servant of Satan. He deceives himself and others.

How can I express my grief and despair? They are beyond words and tears, and human understanding. I scrutinise my face carefully in the glass to see if I have changed, but there does not seem any difference.

There is one grey-haired fool in the glass and another outside of it.

My hair has turned grey.

Had I been great and had I possessed the gift of eloquence, I would have raised my voice and made the whole world mourn for my Lidotchka, but

I am only an insignificant little man, and can merely cry for her as a cow cries for its lost calf.

Even a cow is more effective in her grief, for her cries may be heard by someone in the night, while I have to stifle my sobs for fear that others may hear and object.

I was led to understand, though it was gently done, that I had acted inconsiderately in flaunting my grief before the eyes of others.

It was as though I had got drunk in the midst of the general sobriety.

A casual acquaintance met in the street made me realise this to the full with his exclamation of “A little girl? Oh!”

It was raining and I walked under my umbrella, wondering what was the most important of all things.

The most important thing of all is to bury. Killing doesn’t matter, it will happen sometimes, but to bury is essential.

As soon as things are covered up and nothing is to be seen, all is well. What would it be like if the four or five million who have now been killed had been left unburied?

A beggar stretched his hand out to me today, and I gave him such a look that his tongue stuck, and his hand dropped to his side. What a look it must have been!

I can’t cry; I can’t remember how it’s done.

Not only my tears have dried up, altogether I seem to have become dry; on the hottest day I never perspire. A curious thing; I must ask a doctor about it.

Conscience indeed! One can understand his anxiety about Poland, but the least said about conscience, the better.

Conscience, conscience; you can’t get away from it, no matter how hard you try.

Conscientious people are to be seen everywhere. They quite alarm a fool like me. To plunder, to betray, to starve children, is all done in the name of conscience. No one can raise any objections. It’s war time, you see, and can’t be helped!